PTP #15
From Steven Landsburg
Some people stand on escalators; some people walk. Some people do a little standing and a little walking—and of those latter people it is almost always in that order: stand first, walk toward the end. Why is that? Why do people walk in the second half of their escalator trips?
Or an adjacent question, as Landsburg puts it: why do people stand still on escalators but not on stairs?
If I may editorialize: I posed the question to a friend recently, and she rightly pointed out that “it would be crazy” to walk the first half and stand the second half of an escalator trip. Think about doing it yourself! Philip Wicksteed uses the line from Goethe as an epigraph to The Common Sense of Political Economy (his translation): We are all doing it; very few of us understand what we are doing.
Reminder: you could check the source right away for the answer, but you are only cheating yourself…